Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”

“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.”

“The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?”

“You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.”

“The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.”

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”

“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.